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It's been a while since last testing Windows 10 vs. Linux on different, newer Linux game ports with a variety of GPUs, but that changed this week. As mentioned this weekend, I've been working on a large, fresh Windows vs. Linux gaming performance comparison. The results available today are for NVIDIA with testing a GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 on Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 with the latest drivers and using a variety of newer Direct3D 11/12 / OpenGL / Vulkan games.

Today the NVIDIA Windows vs. Linux results are complete while in the coming days will be similar results available for Radeon graphics and a shorter comparison with Intel Kabylake graphics. A variety of new and old Linux games were used for testing. Titles tested included Company of Heroes 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, GRID Autosport, Metro Last Light Redux, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Civilization VI, Tomb Raider, Total War: WARHAMMER, and The Talos Principle.

Many of those games needed to be manually tested compared to fully-automated test orchestration via the Phoronix Test Suite. So also tested were some of our older, fully-automated, cross-platform OpenGL test cases including OpenArena, Unigine Heaven, Unigine Valley, and GpuTest.

The same system was used throughout testing and included an Intel Core i7 7700K, MSI Z270A-PRO motherboard, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3200MHz memory, Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD 256GB, and the two reference GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 graphics cards. Ubuntu 16.10 and Windows 10 Pro were each freshly installed and with all available updates as of this past weekend. The Linux versions worth mentioning include the Linux 4.8 kernel, Unity 7.5 desktop, and X.Org Server 1.18.4. The latest public drivers were used for testing and included the NVIDIA 376.53 Windows driver and NVIDIA 378.09 Linux driver.

The testing is quite straight-forward so let's get to these latest Windows vs. Linux gaming numbers. If you do appreciate all of the Linux-focused testing done at Phoronix.com, consider joining Phoronix Premium to help support these efforts to view the site ad-free and view multi-page articles on a single page (such as this article, which involved a lot of manual testing and spent the better part of one week conducting). Thanks for your support.

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